Welcome to Paradise: Watch Green Day Play ‘Dookie’ Front to Back

Berkeley punx celebrate breakout LP's 20th anniversary (a year early)

Green Day dropped a nice surprise on their fans Wednesday night, performing their classic 1994 album Dookie in its entirety at London’s Brixton Academy. As Consequence of Sound points out, the pop-punk vets suddenly transitioned from American Idiot tearjerker “Wake Me Up When September Ends” to their world-dominating (and genre-defining) third LP.

“So next year, in 2014, it’s gonna mark the 20-year anniversary of a record called Dookie,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said onstage. “So right now we’re going to play the whole record from front to back.” No biggie — not like “When I Come Around,”“Longview,” and “Basket Case” became generational anthems for a certain subset of snot-nosed, hair-coloring, hook-loving teenagers or anything.

Amazingly, some kindhearted spirit caught the whole 38-minute set on camera and posted the crisp footage online. Nearly two decades after Dookie’s release, Armstrong and co. still tear into the songs, and the crowd still knows every word. Take a nostalgia trip above. At the very least, the video serves as a reminder of a time before Green Day was an industry, before they ever ripped off another artist’s work for heavy-handed religious imagery.

Still, for fans who prefer the band’s latter day work, here’s a little something: Billboard reports that Broadway Idiot, the Doug Hamilton-directed documentary about Green Day’s American Idiot musical, is slated to hit the big screen this fall. The film will begin a limited engagement in New York on October 11 before rolling out to movie theaters across the U.S. and Canada a week later, on October 18. Broadway Idiot will also be available on video on demand services.

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